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Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
VOL. XII, NO. 1 / JUNE 2020: 27-48, ISSN 2067-3655, www.metajournal.org
Body, World and Dress: Phenomenological and
Somaesthetic Observations on Fashion
Stefano Marino
University of Bologna
Abstract
Hilary Putnam introduced the idea of the threefold relation between mind,
body and world that it is necessary to take into consideration to adequately
account for human perception and understanding. Recent philosophical debates
on aesthetic practices that are characteristic of the present age have paid great
attention to the fundamental role played by the body in our world-experience
and, in case of the aesthetics of fashion (as part of the investigation of aesthetic
experiences that have acquired an extraordinary power and significance in
today’s widely aestheticized world), also to the essential role played by dress to
understand the human beings’ particular relation to their own bodies. In this
article, I first offer a general overview on the often problematic but nevertheless
intriguing relationship between fashion and philosophy, and on the importance
of the body/dress relation in the work of some relevant fashion theorists. Then,
I focus on the contribution of Eugen Fink who inquired into fashion with great
interest and accuracy, understanding it as a complex and multifaceted
phenomenon and connecting it to other fundamental topics of investigation like
the body and play. Finally, I show how these questions, and especially that of
the central role played by the body in all aspects of our world-experience (where
the body is understood as both a natural and cultural entity, or even as the
place in which nature and culture intersect themselves), are also crucial in the
philosophy of Richard Shusterman, and how the latter’s reflections can be
fruitfully compared to Fink’s abovementioned phenomenological investigation
of the significance of clothing and fashion.
Keywords: aesthetics of fashion, embodiment, phenomenology, pragmatism,
Eugen Fink, Richard Shusterman
I.
In recent debates on aesthetic practices, experiences and
dimensions that are characteristic of the present age, and that
have acquired an extraordinary power and significance in
27META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
shaping our sensus communis aestheticus in today’s widely
aestheticized world1, one of the main fields that have emerged
is the aesthetics of fashion. Moving from the pioneering
contributions on fashion of such thinkers as Simmel, Veblen or
Benjamin, and also from more recent philosophical-sociological
writings by such authors as Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu and
Lipovetsky, several original and important works on this topic
have appeared in recent times2. This clearly testifies, also with
regard to fashion, the general need to overcome what Richard
Shusterman has called “the narrowness of [a certain] dominant
conception” (Shusterman 2000, 140) in aesthetics and to
broaden this field beyond the limits of the traditional
philosophy of fine arts. As has been noted, in order to develop
an adequate understanding of the present aesthetic situation it
is important to take into account
the essential difference between the traditional reference points of
aesthetics and the reality we effectively experience today. According
to what we may define the aesthetic common sense, grounded on a
traditional conception of art, the latter represented a noble and
refined domain designated to shape people’s taste in certain
institutional circumstances in which everyday life was somehow
interrupted or suspended (as it still happens today in museums, art
galleries, concert halls, theaters, and academies). But the dynamics
presiding over the shaping and education of taste today are vice
versa nearly completely coincident with those experienced in our
“high-aesthetical” everyday lives, namely in the “aestheticized
reality” that represents the ideal setting for the cultivation and
diffusion of processes that are primarily embodied by fashion. It is
not coincidental that the difference between art creations,
entertainment performances, and fashion events has grown
increasingly imperceptible as far as both the participants to the
events, the logic underlying them, the way they take place, and
finally the institutional settings of these happenings, are concerned
(Matteucci 2016, 50).
With regard to fashion, already at the beginning of the
20th century Georg Simmel had understood and made explicit
that “the increased power of fashion [had] overstepped the
bounds of its original domain, which comprised only externals
of dress”, and had now acquired “an increasing influence over
taste, theoretical convictions, and even the moral foundations of
life in their changing forms” (Simmel 1997, 193). About one
28Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
hundred years later, this has been acknowledged by many other
theorists. For example, according to Lars F. Svendsen,
[f]ashion has been one of the most influential phenomena in Western
civilization since the Renaissance. It has conquered an increasing
number of modern man’s fields of activity and has become almost
‘second nature’ to us. So an understanding of fashion ought to
contribute to an understanding of ourselves and the way we act. […]
Fashion affects the attitude of most people towards both themselves
and others, […] and as such it is a phenomenon that ought to be
central to our attempts to understand ourselves in our historical
situation […]. [A]n understanding of fashion is necessary in order to
gain an adequate understanding of the modern world. (Svendsen
2006, 7, 10)
However, notwithstanding the great importance for the
human being of clothing and fashion, there has been until
recent times a general tendency to ignore them and to neglect
their intellectual and institutional significance. Indeed, “the
study of fashion is of recent origin”, and it took quite a long
time “before fashion became a legitimate research topic for
scholars, including social scientists” (Kawamura 2005, 6). An
interest in fashion as a topic arose during the 19th century, but
even in the 20th century “fashion and/or clothing as a research
topic have never been popular”: the scholars involved in the field
of fashion studies often had and still have to face “the academic
devaluation of fashion as a topic” (Kawamura 2005, 8).
As noted by Elizabeth Wilson, fashion has been
“constantly denigrated” and therefore “the serious study of
fashion has had repeatedly to justify itself”: “all serious books
about fashion seem invariably to need to return to first
principles and argue anew for the importance of dress” (Wilson
2003, 47, 271). If this is true for the field of social and human
sciences in general, it is even more valid for and appropriate for
the specific field of philosophy. If we set aside a list of literary
and essayistic writings of poets and novelists, intellectuals,
artists or moralists3, and if we limit ourselves to works that can
be considered as strictly philosophical and undoubtedly
belonging to the academic domain of philosophy, it becomes
difficult to avoid the impression of a veritable “philosophic fear
of fashion” (see Hanson 1993). A philosophical fear, the latter,
29META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
that is mostly connected to squeamishness about the body as an
object worthy of intellectual attention (Pappas 2016a, 87n).
Of course, it is possible to come up with a list of
philosophers who have provided sometimes only short and
episodic remarks on fashion but occasionally instead extended
analyses and systematic observations about it4. However,
notwithstanding the existence of a minor but interesting
tradition of philosophical perspectives on fashion, it is difficult
to deny that, in general, “fashion has been virtually ignored by
philosophers, possibly because it was thought that this, the
most superficial of all phenomena, could hardly be a worthy
object of study for so ‘profound’ a discipline as philosophy”: in
short, fashion “cannot at any rate be said to be a fashionable
theme in philosophy”, it has not been “considered a satisfactory
object of study” (Svendsen 2006, 7, 17). Anyway, as observed by
Nickolas Pappas, “sooner or later everything comes to interest
philosophy”; if, on the one hand, “there is a view of the field
according to which philosophy once encompassed every inquiry
and went on to lose parts of itself one by one as each field saw
how to be scientific”, on the other hand there is also a view of
the field according to which “philosophy’s curiosity continues to
seize on more of what is said and done and not yet brought into
philosophy’s consciousness”: if it was “relativity a century ago”,
perhaps “it’s brain science and film today” (Pappas 2016a, 73) –
and also fashion, we could add.
2.
As noted by Elizabeth Wilson, dress “links the biological
body to the social being, and public to private”, and this “makes
it uneasy territory”: in fact,
it forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a
biological entity, It is an organism in culture, a cultural artefact
even, and its own boundaries are unclear. […] If the body with its
open orifices is itself dangerously ambiguous, then dress, which is an
extension of the body yet not quite part of it, not only links that body
to the social world, but also more clearly separates the two. Dress is
the frontier between the self and the not-self. […] In all societies the
body is ‘dressed’, and everywhere dress and adornment play
symbolic, communicative and aesthetic roles. Dress is always
‘unspeakably meaningful’. […] Dress in general seems then to fulfill a
30Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
number of social, aesthetic and psychological functions; indeed it
knots them together, and can express all simultaneously. This is true
of modern as of ancient dress. What is added to dress as we ourselves
know it in the West is fashion. The growth of the European city in
the early stages of what is known as mercantile capitalism at the end
of the Middle Ages saw the birth of fashionable dress, that is of
something qualitatively new and different. Fashion is dress in which
the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion, in
a sense is change, and in modern Western societies no clothes are
outside fashion (Wilson 2003, 2-3).
From this point of view, inasmuch as dress immediately
covers the surface of our body and thus presents it to the world
as “never naked” but rather “always dressed”, thus
representing something like a “second skin” (see Entwistle
2000) for such “second-nature animals”5 as the creatures that
we are, clothing (and fashion, since the modern age) is clearly
connected to the bodily dimension of human life. Indeed,
understanding the phenomenon of clothing even appears as
indispensable to adequately account for the particular relation
that human beings normally have with their bodies throughout
their life. Now, together with some recent developments of
pragmatism like somaesthetics – the new disciplinary proposal
introduced by Richard Shusterman and defined as “the critical,
meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a
locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation [aisthesis] and creative
self-fashioning” (Shusterman 2000, 267) –, the philosophical
tradition that has probably paid the greatest attention to the
rehabilitation of the embodied constitution of the human world-
experience as such is phenomenology. From Husserl until
today, investigating the body has represented a major goal of
inquiry in the phenomenological tradition that has shown the
body’s “ontological centrality as the focal point from which our
world and reciprocally ourselves are constructively projected”
(Shusterman 2000, 270-271)6.
As has been noted, the “denial of the cognitive
significance of the body has a long tradition”, stemming from
Plato and arriving to the present age, inasmuch as “a
disembodied view on the mind was also found in classical
cognitive science” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 131). However,
“an alternative philosophical backdrop” or “alternative
approach” to the perhaps still prevailing but inadequate
31META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
conceptions of the mind/body and mind/world relationships “is
alive and well”, and has been “worked out in the
phenomenological views” of various philosophers who
attempted to “dig deeper into the meaning of embodiment, how
it situates us and how it shapes our cognitive experience”
(Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 134). So, in general, according to
phenomenological investigations of the body, the latter is not
“one object among others” but rather
is considered a constitutive or transcendental principle, precisely
because it is involved in the very possibility of experience. It is deeply
implicated in our relation to the world, in our relation to others, and
in our self-relation, and its analysis consequently proves crucial for
our understanding of the mind-world relation, for our understanding
of the relation between self and other, and for our understanding of
the mind-body relation. The phenomenological emphasis on the body
obviously entails a rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism. But it
should be just as obvious that this does not entail an endorsement of
some kind of Cartesian materialism. It is not as if the
phenomenological way to “overcome” dualism is by retaining the
distinction between mind and body, and then simply getting rid of
the mind. Rather, the notion of embodiment, the notion of an
embodied mind or a minded body, is meant to replace the ordinary
notions of mind and body, both of which are derivations and
abstractions. […] The lived body is neither spirit nor nature, neither
soul nor body, neither inner nor outer, neither subject nor object. All
of these contraposed categories are derivations of something more
basic. […] The body is not a screen between me and the world; rather,
it shapes our primary way of being-in-the-world. […] Moreover, all of
[the] aspects of embodiment shape the way I perceive the world. […]
Since this is the lived body with which I perceive and act, it is in
constant connection with the world. And this connection is not a mere
surface-to-surface contact, as a corpse might lie on the surface of a
table; rather, my body is integrated with the world. To be situated in
the world means not simply to be located someplace in a physical
environment, but to be in rapport with circumstances that are bodily
meaningful (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 135, 137).
In my view, this can be easily connected to some
developments in the abovementioned field of somaesthetics, as
testified for example by Shusterman’s book Body
Consciousness, where we read:
The term “soma” indicates a living, feeling, sentient body rather than
a mere physical body that could be devoid of life and sensation, while
the “aesthetic” in somaesthetics has the dual role of emphasizing the
soma’s perceptual role (whose embodied intentionality contradicts
32Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
the body/mind dichotomy) and its aesthetic uses both in stylizing
one’s self and in appreciating the aesthetic qualities of other selves
and things. […] If embodied experience is so formative of our being
and connection to the world, if (in Husserl’s words) “the Body is […]
the medium of all perception”, then body consciousness surely
warrants cultivating, not only to improve its perceptual acuity and
savor the satisfactions it offers but also to address philosophy’s core
injunction to “know thyself” […]. The body expresses the ambiguity of
human being, as both subjective sensibility that experiences the
world and as an object perceived in that world. A radiating
subjectivity constituting “the very centre of our experience”, the body
cannot be properly understood as a mere object; yet, it inevitably also
functions in our experience as an object of consciousness, even of
one’s own embodied consciousness. […] I thus both am body and have
a body. I usually experience my body as the transparent source of my
perception or action, and not as an object of awareness. It is that
from which and through which I grasp or manipulate the objects of
the world on which I am focused, but I do not grasp it as an explicit
object of consciousness, even if it is sometimes obscurely felt as a
background condition of perception. But often, especially in
situations of doubt or difficulty, I also perceive my body as something
that I have and use rather than am, something I must command to
perform what I will but that often fails in performance, something
that distracts, disturbs, or makes me suffer (Shusterman 2008, 1-3).
3.
Far from being irrelevant for an aesthetics to fashion,
what has been said above about the phenomenology of the body
proves to be very important, because not so many philosophers,
in general, have addressed fashion as a subject of inquiry, and
because even among those philosophers who have, not so many
really took into consideration the body/dress relationship. A
relationship, the latter, that is of fundamental importance to
adequately account for both dress as a sort of “second lived
body” and fashion as an essential aesthetic practice. A relevant
exception to this mainstream is precisely represented by a
phenomenologist, and indeed a very important one: Eugen
Fink, emphatically defined by Husserl himself as “the greatest
phenomenon of phenomenology” (Husserl, quoted in Moore and
Turner 2016, 1). In fact, in his 1969 book entitled Mode: ein
verführerisches Spiel Fink investigated clothing and fashion
with great interest and accuracy, connecting them to the basic
anthropological structure of the human being.
33META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
If Fink’s entire path of thinking can be divided into
different phases (as argued for example by Simona Bertolini, an
expert scholar of Fink who has distinguished three steps or
phases in Fink’s Denkweg) (see Bertolini 2012), then his short
but remarkable book on fashion from 1969 must be placed in
the context of the late phenomenological-anthropological
development of his philosophy, especially focused on play
(Spiel) and world (Welt)7. As Fink explains in another short but
fundamental work, Oase des Glücks, “play is not a marginal
manifestation in the landscape of human life” but it rather
“belongs essentially to the ontological constitution of human
existence”: play “is an existentiell”, “a fundamental phenomenon
of existence, just as primordial and independent as death, love,
work and ruling”; it is “a phenomenon of existence of an
entirely enigmatic sort”, “a fundamental possibility of social
existence”, “an intimate form of human community”, or even
“the strongest binding power. It is community-founding” (Fink
2016, 15-16, 18-19, 21-23, 27). For Fink, playing
is always a confrontation with beings. In the plaything, the whole is
concentrated in a single thing. Every instance of play is an attempt
on the part of life, a vital experiment, which experiences in the
plaything the epitome of resistant beings in general. […] [W]e must
distinguish between the real human being who “plays” and the
human role within the instance of play. […] In the enactment of play,
there remains a knowledge, albeit strongly reduced, about [the
player’s] double existence. It exists in two spheres […]. This doubling
belongs to the essence of playing. All the structural aspects touched
on until now come together in the fundamental concept of the
playworld. Every sort of playing is the magical production of a
playworld. […] The playworld is an imaginary dimension, whose
ontological sense poses an obscure and difficult problem. We play in
the so-called actual world but we thereby attain (erspielen) a realm,
an enigmatic field, that is not nothing and yet is nothing actual. […]
[T]he imaginary character of the playworld cannot be explained as a
phenomenon of a merely subjective appearance, nor determined to be
a delusion that exists only within the interiority of a soul but in no
way is found among and between things in general. The more one
attempts to reflect on play, the more enigmatic and questionworthy it
seems to become. […] The relation of the human being to the
enigmatic appearance of the playworld, to the dimension of the
imaginary, is ambiguous. […] The greatest questions and problems of
philosophy are lodged in the most ordinary words and things. The
concept of appearance is as obscure and unexplored as the concept of
34Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
Being and both concepts belong together in an opaque, confusing,
downright labyrinthine way, permeating one another in their
interplay. […] Play is creative bringing-forth, it is a production. The
product is the playworld, a sphere of appearance, a field whose
actuality is obviously not a very settled matter. And nevertheless the
appearance of the playworld is not simply nothing. […] The
playworld contains [both] subjective elements of fantasy and
objective, ontic elements. […] Playing is finite creativity within the
magical dimension of appearance. […] Human play is (even if we no
longer know it) the symbolic activity of bringing the sense of the
world and life to presence (Fink 2016, 23-26, 28-30).
Fink’s philosophical conception of fashion – that also
pays great attention to the relevance of the body/dress relation,
as I said – must be contextualized within his more general
theory of the central role “played” by play in the whole of the
human existence. This is confirmed by a few strategic passages
of Mode: ein verführerisches Spiel, where Fink employs the
concept of play to explain what fashion really is in its very
“essence”, i.e. also from an ontological point of view concerning
the Seinsrang or Seinssinn of this phenomenon. Inasmuch as it
belongs to the sphere of play that, in turn, is part of what Fink
calls “the decisive fundamental phenomena of human
existence”, fashion proves to be extremely useful also from a
philosophical point of view. Indeed, fashion proves to be a
phenomenon that can allow us to better grasp some of the
significant aspects of human existence already emphasized by
Fink with regard to play, such as the status of appearances, the
relevance of appearances for the life of a community or society
(and hence also the question of so-called social appearances8),
and the complex, polysemous, multidimensional and
fundamentally ambiguous relation of the human being to
his/her body and the world.
4.
Starting from the question concerning the particular
nature of the human being, in his book on the aesthetics of
fashion Fink significantly defines the human being as “a
player”9; as a peculiar, odd animal that unites in itself nature
and freedom, impulse and rationality; as “a curious creature”
that “is condemned to self-organization and self-formation”10. It
35META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
is in this context that the fundamental significance of play for
the human being (and, arising from this, the “playful” character
of fashion itself) emerges. Fink is quite explicit on this point,
and in fact he says that fashion relies on “the free play-impulse
of the human being”: for him, “fashion belongs to the realm of
freedom and play” and, from this point of view, developing an
adequate understanding of what fashion actually is represents
“a cultural-pedagogical task of the first rank, in order to gain a
self-comprehension of the human being as a player” (Fink 1969,
90, 96, 113). This also leads Fink to understand fashion as
belonging to the dimension of sociability and free time or
leisure: a question, the latter, to which he dedicates many
pages and remarks in his book11.
What is remarkable in Fink’s investigation of fashion is
also his capacity to provide a non-reductionist approach:
namely, an approach that is able to avoid the reduction of such
a complex phenomenon to a single and supposedly simple
principle, aspect or element, and even to recognize fashion as a
human activity whose antinomical essence, so to speak, consists
in being one thing and at the same time the opposite. This
makes it possible, for example, to explicitly compare his
phenomenological approach to fashion to Georg Simmel’s
understanding of fashion as grounded at one and the same time
on the twofold drive toward imitation and differentiation (both
individual and collective), or even as peculiarly suspended or
oscillating between being and not-being. For Simmel, fashion
possesses the peculiar attraction of limitation, the attraction of a
simultaneous beginning and end, the charm of newness and
simultaneously of transitoriness. […] Fashion is […] imitation of a
given pattern and thus satisfies the need for social adaptation; it
leads the individual onto the path that everyone travels, it furnishes
a general condition that resolves the conduct of every individual into
a mere example. At the same time, and to no less a degree, it satisfies
the need for distinction, the tendency towards differentiation, change
and individual contrast. […] Hence fashion is nothing more than a
particular instance among the many forms of life by the aid of which
we seek to combine in a unified act the tendency towards social
equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and
variation. […] Connection and differentiation are the two fundamental
functions which are here inseparably united, of which one of the two,
although or because it forms a logical contrast to the other, becomes
the condition of its realization (Simmel 1997, 188-192).
36Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
With regard to the question of the unique character of
the human being, Fink stresses the latter’s particular
relationship to its body and, connected to this, the central role
played by dress precisely in its relationship to the body12
(including, among other things, the fashion/sexuality
relationship)13. In doing so, i.e. in claiming that our existence is
constitutively embodied, that we are world-open in an embodied
way, that reality is bodily disclosed to us, and that the human
body is not a thing but is rather the human being’s effective
reality, Fink clearly relies on insights into the dual dimension
of our bodily life – namely, into the dual way we can refer to our
own body both as Körper (an objective body, i.e. a mere object, a
thing among things examined from a third-person perspective)
and as Leib (a lived body, the body of a living organism
experienced from a first-person perspective) – that have
characterized to a great extent the development of
phenomenological philosophy. An insight, the latter, that has
also been paid great attention to by Richard Shusterman in the
context of his latest developments of somaesthetics, for example
when he claims that,
if somaesthetics has introduced the term “soma” to distinguish the
living, sentient, purposive human body from the lifeless bodies of
corpses and all sorts of inanimate objects that are bodies in the
general physical sense, this does not preclude the term from having
its own rich ambiguity. Embracing both the mental and the physical,
the soma is both subject and object. It is the bodily, sensory
subjectivity through which we perceive things, including the soma
itself as a bodily object in the world. It thus straddles both sides of
the German phenomenological distinction between Leib (felt bodily
subjectivity) and Körper (physical body as object in the world). If
Helmut Plessner described the self as being a Leib while having its
body as object (Leibsein and Körperhaben), then somaesthetics takes
its task as understanding and cultivating the soma as both
perceiving subject and expressive object, as being both what it is and
ineluctably has. […] Besides its complexity as both subject and object
in the world, the soma embraces other ambiguities. It exemplifies the
ambiguity of human existence as both shared species-being and
individual difference. Philosophers have emphasized rationality and
language as the distinguishing essence of humankind. But human
embodiment seems just as universal and essential a condition of
humanity. […] The soma reveals that human nature is always more
than merely natural but instead deeply shaped by culture
(Shusterman 2019, 14-15).
37META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
Once again, far from being irrelevant for the specific
purposes of a philosophical inquiry into fashion, the
phenomenological conception of Körper and Leib rather proves
to be essential, inasmuch as it also opens up the possibility of a
general rethinking of the body/dress relationship (“Verhältnis
von Kleid und Leib”, in Fink’s own words) (Fink 1969, 102). In
fact, clothes serve as a cover, as a protection for the human
being, but also (if not in the first place) as a proximate, “close-
to-the-body” means of expression (see Fink 1969, 50). What
emerges is thus a concept of dress, and in particular of
fashionable dress, as a sort of “second lived body (zweiter Leib)”
(Fink 1969, 69) for such particular “second-nature animals” as
the human beings that, following again John McDowell (and a
long tradition of philosophical-anthropological theories that his
insights rely on), are not merely embedded in a natural
environment (Umwelt) like all other animals but are rather
characterized by the possession of a “second nature” and thus
live in a historical-cultural world (Welt)14.
Quite interestingly, somehow analogous observations on
body and dress have been made by such influencing fashion
theorists as Joanne Entwistle and Malcom Barnard (without
ever mentioning Fink, however). The former, in her influential
study The Fashioned Body, also speaks of dress as a sort of
extension of our embodied Self, i.e. as a sort of “second skin”
(see Entwistle 2000)15. While Barnard, for his part, explicitly
refers to Entwistle herself and still other theorists, and argues
that fashion is “about the ‘fashioned’ body”, by which he
understands “not a natural […] body” but rather
a “produced” and therefore “cultured” body. This is partly because
one of the meanings of fashion (as a verb) is “to make” or “to
produce”, and partly because there can be no simple, uncultured,
natural body. […] Even when naked, the body is posed or held in
certain ways, it makes gestures and it is thoroughly meaningful. To
say that the fashioned body is always a cultured body is also to say
that the fashioned body is a meaningful body […]. This is because
saying that fashion is meaningful is to say that fashion is a cultural
phenomenon (Barnard 2007, 4; my emphasis).
In this context, returning to Fink, a decisive element in
his conception is represented by the human capacity to assume
a distanced position from natural impulses (especially those
38Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
concerning natural attraction and seduction), to learn how to
manage and control them, to establish a mediated relationship
with them rather than immediately attempting to satisfy them,
and finally to sublimate such impulses by means of cultural
activities. It is precisely at this point that fashion comes into
play, inasmuch as the latter is understood by Fink as a
seductive game, as a “sphere-in-between” or a “field-in-
between”: namely, as a space that is the result of a typically
human process of sublimation of impulses but does not
function as a means for the latter’s mere repression or
suppression, but rather leads to their intensification and even
exaggeration, although always in the context of culturally
domesticated activities.
From this point of view, fashion’s relation to natural
impulses and seduction is not immediate and one-sided, but
rather complex and also ambiguous, as if fashion played with
them and at the same time was played by them, in an
inextricable intertwinement of activity and passivity16. In more
general terms, in Fink’s perspective fashion seems to share
with human existence as such a fundamental ambiguity17: or
better, fashion embodies the ambiguous character that is
typical of the human being as both a natural and a cultural
being, it takes this ambiguity on, and it actually brings it to
extremes. For Fink, “the phenomenon of fashion is connected to
change, instability, fleetingness” (Fink 1969, 32), and this may
be understood as a reflection, as it were, of the unstable,
uncertain, always transient character of human nature as such
(see, in particular, Fink 1969, 111-113).
5.
It is clear that making fashion’s essentially ambiguous
and multiform character fully explicit implies a refusal to adopt
a simplifying or reductionist approach to this phenomenon, and
thus leads one to ask the question as to whether or not there is
a particular aspect or dimension of fashion that may be taken
as a privileged key to gain an adequate access to it. Fink’s
answer to this question is that such a privileged key is
represented by the aesthetic dimension: that is, should one
want to assign fashion to a particular domain within the broad
39META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
and complex realm of various philosophical disciplines
(ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics,
metaphysics, etc.), it would be definitely aesthetics.
Quite interestingly, this is also something that several
fashion theorists have paid great attention to. To quote again
Elizabeth Wilson, what is required in order to adequately
account for fashion is “an explanation in aesthetic terms”: for
Wilson, fashion is “a branch of aesthetics”, it is “one among
many forms of aesthetic creativity which make possible the
exploration of alternatives”, in short it is “a serious aesthetic
medium” (Wilson 2003, 116, 245, 268). Indeed, one of the main
reasons why fashion greatly conditions our lives and even
contributes to the definition of the Zeitgeist of the present age,
probably lies in its aesthetic potentialities. For example, it lies
in the capacity of fashion to express, through aesthetic means,
symbolic contents that come to play a relevant role in the
definition of both our individual and collective identities. As
further observed by Wilson, fashion represents “an aesthetic
medium for the expression of ideas, desires and beliefs
circulating in society”: for her, “everywhere dress and
adornment play symbolic, communicative and aesthetic roles”,
and she adds that in various cases the theorists’ attempts to
reduce fashion to psychology or sociology have led us to exclude,
“or at best minimise, the vital aesthetic element of fashion”
(Wilson 2003, 3, 9).
In Fink’s essay Mode: ein verführerisches Spiel the idea
of a “peculiar aesthetic function of fashion” (Fink 1969, 70)
emerges, for example, in connection to the question of
leadership or command in fashion. A question, the latter, that
Fink proposes to solve, as it were, by introducing the concept of
seduction as quintessential to understand what fashion really is
and how it functions (see Fink 1969, 96-101). In fact, for Fink
fashion’s influence on us, its capacity to determine our taste
and preferences, often extending its conditioning power to our
lifestyle and our decisions in other dimensions of our life, does
not derive from some kind of command or authoritative
coercion. Rather, it is the result of fashion’s persuasive power
deriving from its incomparable ability to play with seduction,
with the human being’s fundamental need to fascinate and at
40Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
the same time be fascinated or seduced. This persuasion and
seduction power is precisely exercised by fashion with aesthetic
means, i.e. thanks to its capacity to play in always new ways
with forms and contents, materials and colors, in order to
produce original works that may fascinate us and may be
aesthetically appreciated and enjoyed by us. On this basis, Fink
strategically makes use of such important concepts of aesthetics
as Schein, Verklärung, Phantasie or Illusion, and eventually
draws the conclusion that fashion’s essential way of being, i.e.
what it really is, is precisely “a seductive play” and “a seductive
appearance” (Fink 1969, 101).
6.
It is quite intriguing to see how many of the questions
and aspects that have emerged from Fink’s phenomenological
treatment of the body/dress relation and the idea of clothes as a
sort of “second skin” for the “second-nature animals” that we
are, can be fruitfully compared to some recent somaesthetic
observations on body, dress and fashion from the pragmatist
philosopher Richard Shusterman. As already observed before,
the concept of “soma” introduced precisely by somaesthetics
refers to “the living, sentient, purposive human body” and is
aimed to embrace “both the mental and the physical”, and also
both the natural and the cultural in their complex mutual
intertwinement, thus including “both sides of the German
phenomenological distinction between Leib […] and Körper”: as
Shusterman explains, “the soma reveals that human nature is
always more than merely natural but instead deeply shaped by
culture” (Shusterman 2019, 14-15). Now, it is clear that the
cultural nature (so to speak) of the human body’s relation to the
world does not depend only on the fact that, as Elizabeth
Wilson claims, “in all societies the body is ‘dressed’, and
everywhere dress and adornment play symbolic, communicative
and aesthetic roles” (Wilson 2003, 2). However, it is also clear
that clothing, inasmuch as it is such a universal and thus
fundamental-anthropological phenomenon, plays a great role in
this process. This evidently makes it an interesting object for
inquiry for such a philosophical discipline as somaesthetics,
with its aim to favor
41META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
[a] critical study and meliorative cultivation of the experience and
use of the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation
(aesthesis) and creative self-stylization. An ameliorative discipline of
both theory and practice, somaesthetics seeks to enrich not only our
discursive knowledge of the body but also our lived somatic
experience and performance; it aims to improve the meaning,
understanding, efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the
environments to which our actions contribute and from which they
also derive their energies and significance. To pursue these aims,
somaesthetics is concerned with a wide diversity of knowledge forms,
discourses, social practices and institutions, cultural traditions and
values, and bodily disciplines that structure (or could improve) such
somatic understanding and cultivation” and its internal division in
branches (Shusterman 2016, 101).
From the point of view of somaesthetics – which is “an
interdisciplinary project, in which theory and practice are
closely connected and reciprocally nourish each other”
(Shusterman 2016, 101) – clothing and fashion especially
appear as interesting objects of inquiry because of their
essentially ambiguous character. This can be clearly and
explicitly connected to some of Fink’s abovementioned
observations on the same topic. In fact, if the human body’s
intrinsic dialectic of Leibsein and Körperhaben “expresses the
ambiguity of human being” (Shusterman 2008, 1), in an
analogous way also “the notion of fashion embraces
considerable ambiguity” (Shusterman 2016, 95). Fashion –
understood by Shusterman as “a complex, paradoxical
enterprise of trying to reconcile contrasting elements into a
compelling fit”, and as “a complex process of fitting a striking
variety of conflicting forces together in a productive and
dynamic balance” – is surely “a social and cultural product”
(Shusterman 2016, 92, 95, 98). At the same time, however,
especially because of its relation to the fundamental human
phenomenon of clothing, fashion “appears to derive from the
deeper physiological and psychological essence of human
nature”, i.e. it is “‘by nature’ artificial” (Shusterman 2016, 98)
like the human being. This, once again, clearly reminds us of
some of the abovementioned observations on fashion offered by
Fink from a phenomenological perspective that can be fruitfully
compared to Shusterman’s recent somaesthetic developments of
this topic. According to him,
42Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
fashion paradoxically reveals the body it conceals precisely by
concealing it. […] Though clothing is not strictly speaking part of
one’s body in the way that a tattoo belongs to it, our bodies shape our
clothes in ways that they do not shape more external fashion
accessories. […] [O]ur clothes shape our bodies. […] We need also to
consider the ways our clothing shapes our somatic habits, because
the purposive body is not simply a bundle of bones and flesh but a
complex of postural and behavioral dispositions that guide our
actions without our needing to think about them explicitly. […]
[C]lothes also have a social meaning as they are associated with
certain attitudes that wearers of those clothes spontaneously adopt
through prior experience in wearing those clothes. […] As clothes are
made to fit the bodies and movements of men and women, so the
bodily behavior of those men and women are conversely made
(through training or implicit learning) to fit the meanings of those
clothes (Shusterman 2016, 98-99).
As Shusterman claims, “a vast and complex array of
pragmatic disciplines has been designed to improve our
experience and use of our bodies”, and this includes “forms of
grooming and decoration, martial and erotic arts, yoga,
massage, aerobics, bodybuilding, calisthenics, and modern
psychosomatic disciplines” (Shusterman 2016, 102), and also
clothing and fashion. If it is true that “our bodies are visible
social markers of our values, affiliations, and tastes”, then we
can say that it is also through the particular kind of “somatic
self-stylization” (Shusterman 2016, 103) provided by fashion (in
its being an unceasing play with forms, colors and seductive
appearances) that individuals, in the present age of widespread
aestheticization, have the chance to develop their unique
“somatic styles” (Shusterman 2011). Returning once more to the
question of play, our goal should thus be that of becoming
acquainted with fashion, of freely, actively and even joyfully
playing with it (instead than being passively played by it, i.e.
conditioned and even determined by its often incomprehensible
and unbearable caprices), of autonomously developing our own
“somatic style”, and of individually finding the right connection
between our own Leib and the “second lived body” that, as we
have seen, is dress.
NOTES
43META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – XII (1) / 2020
1 For a reconstruction and interpretation of current debates on
aestheticization (sometimes also viewed as the aesthetic counterpart of
globalization), see for instance: Michaud 2003, Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013,
Di Stefano 2017, Matteucci 2017, Mecacci 2017, Iannilli 2018.
2 Recent and relevant philosophical works on fashion include, for example, for
instance, the books and collections by Scapp and Seitz 2010; Wolfendale and
Kennett 2011; Matteucci and Marino 2016; Pappas 2016b.
3 An excellent reconstruction and interpretation, that also takes into
examination earlier literary and essayistic studies on fashion before the 19 th
century, can be found in Esposito (2004, especially 7-16, 34-42, 65-73).
4 On this topic, let me remind the reader of Marino 2016.
5 I freely adapt here to my purposes the important concept of “second nature”
employed by John McDowell in his famous epistemological work Mind and
World (1996), which can be also connected to a long and influential tradition
of phenomenological, hermeneutical and philosophical-anthropological
reflections on human nature in 19th- and 20th-century German thought (on
this topic, see Marino 2015, chapter 1).
6 To be precise, Shusterman refers here to Merleau-Ponty that he also
emphatically defines in subsequent writings as “something like the patron saint
of the body […] in the field of Western philosophy” (Shusterman 2008, 49).
7 According to Simona Bertolini, “the notion of world is the key concept of
Fink’s entire post-war philosophical work. […] The concept of world-totality is
the veritable barycentre of Fink’s philosophy” (Bertolini 2012, 128, 242). In
turn, for Bertolini, Fink’s idea of “cosmological difference”, clearly deriving
from the concept of kosmos (expressed in German with such words as Welt,
Weltganzheit, Weltsein), reminds of Heidegger’s famous idea of the
“ontological difference” between Being and beings but does not fully
correspond to it.
8 On this topic, see for example Carnevali 2020.
9 “The human being – as a player – is close to fashion and all its phenomenical
forms” (Fink 1969, 40).
10 See also the insights and explanations on this aspect provided at pages 22-
23, 53, 64 of Fink’s book.
11 On the general significance of sociability for human life, in general, and
its connection to the domain of play, in particular, see Fink 1969, 79-81, 85-
86, 88, 93.
12 For Fink, “the human body always already shows, reveals […] and permeates
at the same time clothing with its tendency to communication. […] Fashion is a
phenomenon that is essentially connected […] to the human being’s embodied
nature, to our existence’s being-incarnated” (Fink 1969, 50, 77).
13 On this aspect, see Fink 1969, 51-53, 69, 71.
14 On this topic, let me remind the reader of Marino 2017.
15 It is probably not by chance that Entwistle’s original account relies, among
others, also on phenomenological insights into the significance of the bodily
dimension for the constitution of our experience of the world in general.
16 More in general, the complexity and, as it were, the eminently dialectical
character of Fink’s conception of fashion (using here the concepts of
“dialectics” and “dialectical” with a broad and quite general meaning) emerges
44Stefano Marino / Body, World and Dress
in the perhaps clearest way when Fink introduces the idea of an intrinsic
relation between opposite moments, antagonisms and contrasts as relevant
and indeed decisive for the definition of fashion: for example, struggle for
eternity vs. transience, naturalness vs. artificialness, imitation vs. distinction,
conformism vs. originality, assimilation to others vs. individualism, public life
vs. private life, dressing vs. undressing (see Fink 1969, 33, 45-46, 62, 69-70,
105). On a terminological level, this aspect especially emerges in the use of
such concepts as Gegenwirkung, Gegenwendigkeit or Gegensatzmotiv (see
Fink 1969, 30, 53, 96-97).
17 “Dress has an ambivalent, equivocal and plurivalent expressive value”
(Fink 1969, 36). Fashionable dress is characterized by its “ambivalence, its
ambiguity and its intrinsic oppositive character” (Fink 1969, 55). “Fashion
has many faces, its smiling gracefulness is more enigmatic than the smile of
the Gioconda” (Fink 1969, 77).
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Stefano Marino is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of
Bologna. His main research interests are focused on critical theory,
hermeneutics, neopragmatism, philosophy of music and aesthetics of fashion.
He is the author of several monographs, among which: Le verità del non-vero.
Tre studi su Adorno, teoria critica ed estetica (2019), Aesthetics, Metaphysics,
Language: Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer (2015), La filosofia di Frank
Zappa. Un’interpretazione adorniana (2014), Gadamer and the Limits of the
Modern Techno-scientific Civilization (2011). He has translated from German
into Italian, or from English into Italian, the following books: Th. W. Adorno,
Variazioni sul jazz. Critica della musica come merce (2018), C. Korsmeyer, Il
senso del gusto. Cibo e filosofia (2015), H.-G. Gadamer, Ermeneutica, etica,
filosofia della storia (2014), H.-G. Gadamer, Che cos’è la verità (2012). He has
published several collections (as books or special issues in journals) as co-
editor, among which: Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Twentieth
Century: A Companion to Its Main Interpretations (2020: forthcoming), Be
Cool! Aesthetic Imperatives and Social Practices (2020), Adorno and Popular
Music: A Constellation of Perspectives (2019), Philosophical Perspectives on
Fashion (2016), Theodor W. Adorno: Truth and Dialectical Experience (2016).
Address:
Stefano Marino
University of Bologna
Associate Professor of Aesthetics
via Zamboni 38, Bologna, Italy
Tel.: +39 051 20 9 8412
http://www.unibo.it/docenti/stefano.marino4
E-mail: stefano.marino4@unibo.it
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